Billing systems including, e.g., electronic billing and payment systems, are a vital part of any commercial business enterprise's infrastructure. Typically, business enterprises generate revenue by billing customers and receiving payments. As such, the need for payment systems represents the lifeblood of a company's financial revenue stream. When a commercial enterprise would like to use an electronic billing and payment system, the enterprise may have a software development team generate a custom software solution to interface and interact with the accounting systems utilized by the enterprise. Such custom development software may require hundreds of thousands of dollars and/or may require months of time to completely implement a billing and payment system. Further, the developed billing system is often “hard coded” or static into a particular billing paradigm, resulting in additional costs and development time to modify any of functionality.
A further disadvantage is that such billing systems require continual maintenance and additional programmer time to modify any aspects of the billing system. Thus, for example, should a commercial enterprise desire to begin accepting payment via an additional entry point, e.g., payment by credit cards, additional software development may be required, with the concomitant issues of new software errors and/or potential downtime of the billing system while it is being tested and implemented.